“She had her own stereotype, and wrote too many books exactly like each other in form.”
Who is speaking,
and about whom? The speaker repeats a common complaint about the novelist in
question. The plots of her twenty novels are undeniably repetitious. They are family-centered
closet dramas, strictly interior, no great outdoors. One can’t imagine her
people on picnics or working at the bank. Descriptions of characters and rooms are
minimal. Page after page hold nothing but highly distilled dialogue, often
unattributed. And it’s often very funny. Yes, I’m talking about Ivy
Compton-Burnett. Her accuser is Rebecca West in her 1981 Paris Review interview.
There’s no
use trying to sell her. Like Henry Green, she’s not for most readers. That’s not
an indictment of anyone. The other night, almost on a whim, I reread The Present and the Past (1953). The situation
of the main character, Cassius Clare, seems unpromising for comedy: he wishes
to love and be loved by family and servants, but has no idea how to accomplish
that. He is befuddled, not evil. But his plight is funny. Compton-Burnett’s
novels, though peculiar, are never self-indulgently avant-garde.
In the
twentieth century, sorry to say, the fiction of English writers was superior to
that produced by Americans. First, recall those born in the nineteenth century but
who manage to squeak in: Conrad, James, Kipling, Ford. Then consider Evelyn
Waugh, Anthony Powell, Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Taylor, P.G.
Wodehouse, Rose Macaulay, V.S. Naipaul, Olivia Manning, Elizabeth Bowen,
Penelope Fitzgerald – not to mention Green and Compton-Burnett. But not Rebecca West. Her
novels are dull, utterly unlike her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). In her interview, she continues
on Compton-Burnett:
“But it was a damn good form. At the time of a rising in South Africa, when it seemed that the colored races were going to burst forth and one was afraid that the white suburbs were being set on fire, I managed to get in happy nights reading the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, But it was very funny that people believed in her story of herself. She was a nanny, and you had only to meet her to see it; all her stories are nanny stories, about how awful the family is. She was very, very clever. You'd have to be very tasteless not to see she had something unique to give her age.”
2 comments:
'She was a nanny, and you only had to meet her to see it'? I doubt anyone else ever mistook ICB for a nanny! She may have mythologised her family history a little, but she had certainly never been a nanny, and in person she came across as the ultimate grande dame. Still, Rebecca West's judgment of her work is a good deal less harsh than that of many of her contemporary critics.
"English literature is the literature of genius, and the Englishman is the great creator. His work outshines the genius of Greece. His wealth outvalues the combined wealth of all modern Europe. The English mind is the only uncoscious mind the world has ever seen. And for this reason the English mind is incapable of criticism."
John Jay Chapman, p. 141 of his Selected Writings edited by Jacques Barzun
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